Authors: David Lawrence, Alain de Botton and Iain Borden
Publisher: Between Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
The definitive architecture, design and cultural history of the motorway service area, its places and its people. Fully illustrated throughout with forewords by Joan Bakewell and Michael Bracewell, writing by Richard Wentworth, and essays by Alain de Botton, Iain Borden, Laurie Taylor and Sancha Briffa.
Little is ever committed to print about roadside diners, and in particular those staggeringly busy and utterly fascinating motorway service stations that serve more meals to more people than probably any other form of eaterie. As a nation of road users, we swarm to these curiously artless places. We really ought to know more about motorway buildings, of their ambitions, their designers, and their special, if ineffably banal place in our daily lives.
In this book, David Lawrence is our guide, and a very good guide too because his research is thorough and enquiring, his tone measured, yet his style lively and driven through with intelligent rather than patronising humour. David Lawrence is the kind of guide who makes such all to often crass places as utterly absorbing as in fact they really are.